Former Gophers receiver Eric Decker and then-fiance Jessie James attend City of HopeÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s 22nd annual Celebrity Softball Challenge during CMA Fest on June 9, 2012 in Nashville. (Rick Diamond/Getty Images for City of Hope)

New York Jets wide receiver Eric Decker (87) celebrates with offensive guard Brian Winters (67) after catching a pass for a touchdown against the New York Giants in the third quarter of a preseason NFL football game, Friday, Aug. 22, 2014, in East Rutherford, N.J. (AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)

COLD SPRING, Minn. — His friends would call his house on summer days, and if Eric Decker was not around, they knew where to find him.

Shoehorned into a residential neighborhood, four blocks from downtown, stands the town treasure, a ball field known as Springer Park. Ivy shrouds the outfield fence. A towering ash tree, bombarded a decade ago by Decker’s left-handed drives, looms beyond right-center field. A sign outside greets visitors: “A Tradition Since 1923.”

Decker operated the scoreboard and retrieved bats and shagged stray balls. More often, he and his pals would gather by the first-base dugout to play a game: One of them would fire a tennis ball against the wall, and anyone who fumbled it three times was pegged, hard, in the posterior. Rarely Decker, though. His hands, even then, were too good.

“My second home,” he said.

When Decker, 27, returns to Cold Spring, his hometown, about 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis, those who know him best have no trouble reconciling the person who left nine years ago to play football at Minnesota with the man he has become: a 6-foot-3 Velcro-handed receiver for the New York Jets who established his bona fides by catching touchdown passes from Peyton Manning in Denver, and who primps for fashion spreads and co-stars on a reality television show with his country-music-star wife.

To them, he is just Eric, or Dex. The guy who followed online as his alma mater, Rocori High School, played in the 2011 state title game, and then, after the Spartans won, called the Side Bar & Grill to surprise every coach with a $50 gift card. The guy who, having experienced the terror of hiding in a library closet when a gunman was on the loose at Rocori, recorded a video message for students at a suburban Denver high school after a shooting there in December.

Before modeling sweaters and duffle coats for GQ, Decker wore a pinstriped Kirby Puckett jersey almost every day for a month. Before appearing with his wife, Jessie James Decker, on the E! program “Eric & Jessie: Game On,” he shone onstage as Little Grunt, a cave boy who discovers a dinosaur egg, as a second-grader at St. Boniface. Before performing extra conditioning drills as penance after an erratic training camp practice last month at SUNY Cortland, he would run extra routes and take extra swings and shoot extra jumpers, with his Rocori coaches urging other players to watch how Eric did it.

As a senior, he was selected by The St. Cloud Times as the area’s player of the year in basketball, his worst — his least best, rather — sport. Had Decker pursued baseball, the Minnesota Twins, who drafted him in the 27th round in 2009 only because it was obvious he wanted to play football after college, projected him as a superb center fielder and a top-of-the-order menace. That decision perplexed many in this baseball-mad burg. “Why can’t you play both sports?” he was asked. But it also directed him to the life he now leads.

“We studied the football tapes more than the reality tapes,” said John Idzik, the Jets’ general manager. “And we loved what we saw.”

It does not happen much anymore, but every so often, when night falls, or if Decker hears a sound or smells a smell, he is transported back to one of the worst days of his life.

On the morning of Sept. 24, 2003, students arrived at Rocori High School thinking about German tests and biology projects and whether the Spartans would defeat St. Cloud Apollo on Friday night. They filed out a few hours later in tears, in fear, their hands in the air. Helicopters buzzed and sirens blared and snipers monitored the chaos from atop the school.

A disgruntled freshman shot and killed a senior, Aaron Rollins, and critically wounded a freshman, Seth Bartell, who died two weeks later.

Decker, a junior, was eating lunch in the cafeteria with Bartell’s older brother, Jesse, when the announcement boomed over the speaker: code red. As they sprinted down a hallway, past the gymnasium, Jesse shrieked, “That’s my brother!” Decker will remember that moment forever.

They bolted into the library, were herded into a closet. There were 12 of them in all. Ten minutes passed. Then 20. Then 30.

“You didn’t know what was going on,” Decker said. “You heard rumors that someone had a gun, but you didn’t know how many people. You’re just sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that it’s OK.”

If not for the bravery of Mark Johnson, a physical education teacher, the carnage could have been worse. Johnson was in the gym when he turned and spotted the gunman. Johnson walked toward him. The gunman raised his gun. Johnson raised his hand. He bellowed, “No!”

“I don’t know if any teacher ever thinks, If I’m put in that position, what would I do?” Johnson said. “You just react.”

The shooter removed the remaining bullets and dropped the gun on the floor. Johnson escorted him to the principal’s office, then ran back to try to resuscitate Rollins.

Everyone felt numb for days, weeks, months. They all grew up together. In Cold Spring, or in Richmond and Rockville, the adjacent towns that Rocori also served. Each grade had about 200 students. Decker played baseball with Rollins, hung out at the Bartells’ cabin.

“It just turns you upside down,” Decker said. “I relive it every time I talk about it.”

School was canceled, but not the football game. Coaches asked if they still wanted to play. Yes, the players said. For a few hours, they said, it might help them escape. The bus ride into St. Cloud, Decker said, was filled with “so much pain.”

After pregame introductions, Apollo’s players walked to the Rocori sideline to offer handshakes. Wearing memorial patches on their jerseys, the Spartans won, 31-13. Decker had 10 catches for 118 yards and also threw for a touchdown.

Kirby Hemmesch, a longtime friend of Decker’s, said that when someone learned that he attended Rocori, hailed from Cold Spring, questions about the shooting inevitably followed. He understands why, he said, but there are too many other things to be proud of: the hometown Springers’ eight state amateur baseball championships; the beer from the Third Street Brewhouse that is also peddled at the Twins’ stadium; the granite fabricated at Coldspring Granite that was used to assemble the famed Touchdown Jesus mosaic at Notre Dame.

Or, he chuckled, a certain friend of his.

Four lanes of Highway 23 scythe through farmland, past the Gold’n Plump poultry processing plant and Dairy Queen and Schwieters Chevrolet, before the first stoplight in 10 miles heralds the entrance to Cold Spring proper, population 4,025.

Vendors at the farmers’ market are identified in The Cold Spring Record, a weekly newspaper, by their first names. Municipal vehicles are affixed with stickers reading, “Hometown Pride.” A buzz cut at Styles Plus costs five bucks.

Decker grew up about a mile southwest of the commercial district, in a house that backed up to the Sauk River, the gateway to a chain of 14 lakes. Later on, he would leap into Knaus Lake from the bridge overpass along Highway 49.

But at age 6 or so, while out on the water, he amazed David Sauer, his next-door neighbor, for the first of many times. On the boat, Sauer tried lifting a 25-pound battery. It barely moved an inch. Decker came over and lugged it to the other side.

“Freakin’ Hulk,” Sauer said.

Decker acted as if he had to catch up, even though he was a mile ahead of everyone else. Because he could, he once stole second in an American Legion game after the pitcher threw over to first 14 straight times.

Divining the source of Decker’s athletic talent is simple. Just look at the plaques hanging at Rocori’s athletics hall of fame: his father, Tom; his uncle, Jim; his aunt, Patti, three-sport athletes all, just like him, just like his older sister, Sarah, whose ambition — she ran track and cross-country at Columbia — inspired him to succeed.

On the basketball court, she throttled him, then demanded he improve: You can shoot better than that, she would say, and so he would practice.

Even as a boy, Decker was consumed by details. His handwriting was neat. His desk at St. Boniface was immaculate.

“Something you wouldn’t normally think a boy would do,” said Barb Wilmesmeier, who taught Decker in second grade.

When it was reported that Decker had scored the best of any prospect in the Wonderlic test at the 2010 NFL scouting combine, his teachers rejoiced. He attended Catholic school through sixth grade, though tales of his athletic ability had spread long before.

James Herberg thought he was the fastest elementary school runner in Rockville. Then he ran against Decker. They met, Herberg recalled, at a sixth-grade dance, when they were vying for the same girl’s affection. Decker marched over, extended his right hand and, turning serious, asked if Herberg wanted to go out back and play football.

“It’s a dance, you know?” said Herberg, who has known Decker for more than 15 years. “I was like, ‘Who is this kid?'”

It was a rare instance in which Decker did not get the girl; during road basketball games, boys at Fergus Falls or Alexandria would taunt him while the girls would swoon, “Oh, my God, it’s Eric Decker!”

During football season, Decker blossomed as a junior, when Sauer took over as quarterback in a pass-oriented offense, and caught 12 touchdowns. He played in the secondary, too, but was so valuable on offense that the coaches decreased his defensive snaps to minimize injury risk.

That is just a minor detail to Hemmesch, who counts a copy of The St. Cloud Times’ high school football preview from 2004 as one of his prized possessions. It lists the starting free safety as K. Hemmesch. The backup: Eric Decker.

“I’m going to make a T-shirt of it someday,” Hemmesch said.

Decker actually did make a T-shirt at Rocori, when he and two other receivers, mimicking the Vikings’ 1998 trio of Cris Carter, Randy Moss and Jake Reed, printed models that said, “3 Deep.”

Mostly, though, Decker’s swagger was subtle. After making a sweet catch, he would flip the ball toward the defensive back he had just burned. In his senior year, before a showdown at undefeated Sartell, he warmed up to chants of “Decker’s sister, Decker’s sister.” When he caught a touchdown on a fade route, he ran by the student section and cupped his hand over his ear.

“When you saw Eric go after the football,” said John Ross, who was then the Sartell coach, “it was like, ‘How are you really going to stop that?'”

Sometimes, he did stumble, like the time when — frustrated — he flung a table-tennis paddle at Sauer’s head (in a rare display of inaccuracy, it missed). Or when he spiked his PlayStation 2 controller, scattering pieces across the basement. His buddies laughed. Then they prepared for the consequences.

“You beat him once, we had to play three times just so he could prove that he’s better than you,” Herberg said. “Because when Eric Decker sets his mind to something, get the hell out of the way.”

Decker set his mind that he would play football in college. The problem was, hardly anyone wanted him.

“Because,” said Joel Baumgarten, Decker’s position coach at Rocori, “you don’t get receivers coming out of central Minnesota.”

Decker’s friends maintain that more colleges would have recruited him as a senior, when he caught 62 passes for 1,058 yards and 15 touchdowns, but before then only two colleges expressed interest: St. John’s, 20 minutes up the road in Collegeville, and Minnesota. No offense, Herberg would tell him, but you’re not a Division III football player.

The summer before his senior season, Decker attended a camp at Minnesota with other potential recruits. All day he torched some of the Twin Cities’ finest cornerbacks. Afterward the coach, Glen Mason, offered him a scholarship on the spot.

At the time, Mason did not realize that he had just added the Golden Gophers’ career leader in receptions (227) and receiving yardage (3,119). Rather, he wondered whether he was the dumbest coach in the nation, or the smartest.

“You start thinking, What are we seeing in this guy that other people don’t?” said Mason, now an analyst for the Big Ten Network.

The next day, Mason said, he received a call from John Gagliardi, the venerable coach at St. John’s.

“Gosh darnit,” Gagliardi said. “You found him.”

Three years ago, Decker realized he had been lying to himself. He always expected to remain a bachelor until he retired. He was too driven, too focused, too invested in his career to worry about anyone else. Then, through a mutual friend, he met Jessie.

At the time, she was living in Nashville, Tennessee, intending to move to Los Angeles. He was training in Arizona. They chatted over the phone for a month before he visited. Two months later, he asked Jessie, a spitfire and a fervent (and often unfiltered) practitioner of social media, to move to Colorado with him. The relationship progressed faster than those in Cold Spring were accustomed to.

“Now, all of a sudden,” Decker said, “I’m married with a kid.”

Their daughter, Vivianne, was born in March, nine months after their wedding was recorded by E! cameras. Their life — split between Nashville and New Jersey, which he described during his introductory conference call as underrated — is normal, Decker said (relatively speaking). So far, he has delighted the Jets, everyone from Geno Smith to Rex Ryan, with his hands, crisp routes and consistency. Smith called him “a quarterback’s best friend.”

The last time many folks saw him here was April 2013. Decker and his wife flew in to attend the wedding of Zach Johnson, the son of the gym teacher, Mark, and the party doubled as the final exam, eight years later, for a course that Mark Johnson instructed at Rocori.

Wanting students to feel comfortable at Stearns County weddings, he had taught them how to waltz and tango and swing and cha-cha, and many at the reception showed off what they had learned, Decker among them. He spent most of the time on the dance floor, his past and present converging.

Decker said he had declined an invitation to compete on “Dancing With the Stars.” Maybe someday, he added. After all, he already knows how to polka.

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